Friends and community members gather at Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland the day after the tragedy to mourn the deaths of the seven people who were killed in the rampage at Oikos University.

Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle

Friends and community members gather at Allen Temple Baptist Church...

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Police and officials walk on Edgewater Road near bodies of victims from the shooting at Oikos University on Monday, April 2, 2012 in Oakland, Calif. Authorities have confirmed that seven people have been killed by a gunman at a Oikos University in Oakland.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

Police and officials walk on Edgewater Road near bodies of victims...

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Tenzin Topchen, at home in Long Beach, hid with seven other students and their instructor in a classroom when the shooting started.

It was Monday morning, almost time for work, but the two sat together before a computer screen in the crowded East Oakland home they shared with Ping's parents and three siblings. It was time for her and Kayzzer to talk with his dad.

Ping's husband, Christian Vicuna, was calling from the Philippines. They'd lived apart for several years, but he assured his wife and son that, yes, they'd soon play ball in the park once his immigration petition was granted.

It was a loving but not unusual start to Katleen Ping's day.

Around 8:45 a.m., her computer chat over, she prepared to leave for her job as the receptionist at Oikos University. The small, private Christian school near the Oakland airport was an easy commute from her home.

She skipped breakfast - her siblings had recently teased her she was getting a belly - kissed Kayzzer once more, told her mother and father she loved them, and promised to return home for lunch.

But she did not.

Less than two hours later, the 24-year-old wife and mother was among seven people shot and killed at Oikos. The gunman has been identified by police and witnesses as One Goh, a disturbed former student who, authorities say, came to the school planning to exact a vengeance no one knew he harbored.

Dressed in a baseball cap, blue jacket and khaki pants, the stocky 43-year-old with a ruddy face had apparently plotted his malevolent act for weeks. It took only 51 minutes for him to carry out his deadly revenge, steal a car and flee to a grocery store, where he surrendered. He later confessed to the mass killings.

In less than an hour, Goh created a tragedy that left behind two kinds of survivors: Those who felt blessed to live and could retell the story of how they survived, and those who wondered why, on that day, their loved ones had to die.

At 10:30 a.m., Goh arrived at the glass door entrance to Oikos University, a long, flat-roofed building in an industrial complex at 7850 Edgewater Drive.

Like all visitors, the first person he would have seen when he entered was Katleen Ping at her desk.

Police said he'd taken BART to the Coliseum Station and transferred to an AC Transit bus. He carried a .45-caliber handgun and four magazines of ammunition.

Before he'd dropped out of the school's nursing program a few months earlier, Goh had developed a reputation for his brooding personality, an intense man who had trouble getting along with his female peers. When he quit, he'd argued with the director of nursing, who denied him a full refund of his $6,000 tuition payment.

Goh knew the layout of the Oikos building.

Six paces to the left of Ping's desk was a large corner classroom with a group of nursing students inside.

Up the hall a few feet and to the right, in one of the building's windowless, interior classrooms, a group of anatomy students discussed the functions of the heart and the vascular system.

Police believe Goh arrived with the intent of killing Wonja Kim, who had been Oikos' assistant director of nursing. But he learned she was not there; she'd also left the university months earlier.

He pulled out the gun. Students in both classrooms heard Ping's scream.

Tenzin Topchen, one of eight anatomy students in the interior classroom, recognized Ping's accent.

A gunshot rang out, but Topchen did not immediately sense danger. Born in Tibet, the 26-year-old had never heard a gunshot before. He thought it was a firecracker.

Then a rapid burst followed - pow pow pow pow. That sounded a lot more like what he'd heard in the movies.

"It was too loud to be anything else," Topchen said.

A female student sitting next to the classroom door jumped up and locked it.

"Turn out the lights," said their instructor, Samuel Lee, a chiropractor.

Topchen dialed 911. Some students hid under their desks, others pressed into the far corners of the dark room.

Light from the hallway shone through the wooden door's small window.

Topchen squatted beneath the chalkboard as he faced the light.

As quietly and loudly as he could, he whispered to the dispatcher, "Shots fired, shots fired."

Gun in hand, Goh had walked Ping from her desk into the first classroom on his left. He yelled for the students to line up near the board at the front of the class.

Goh fired a shot, hitting one student in the chest.

The shooting set off panic, with students fleeing in all directions.

The corner classroom had an exit to the outside, and students burst into the parking lot and ran out along Edgewater Road, bullets following them.

Mary Ping and her husband, Liberty, were in their backyard with their grandson playing badminton. Kayzzer had recently started goofing around with a racket and birdie.

The phone rang around 11 a.m. They assumed it was their daughter, who often checked in before making the 2 1/2-mile drive home for lunch.

Instead, the caller was Ellen Cervellon, Oikos' director of nursing. She hadn't been at work that morning, but told Liberty Ping that she heard on TV there had been a shooting at the school.

Mary Ping, who'd lived in the East Bay for five years, wasn't too worried. But she, her husband and 20-year-old son, Kaine, decided to head to the school just in case. "I know when I leave, this is Oakland. Shootings happen. It's probably some kids doing something, but it has nothing to do with my daughter."

Inside the darkened anatomy classroom, the students hiding from the shooter texted their loved ones.

Topchen whispered to them to keep their cell phones covered. Light from the screens would give them away.

Seconds later, his phone rang in the silent room. It was his mother calling back.

"I pressed it to vibrate as fast as I could," Antonio said. "I was too scared to pick it up."

From the sliver of light at the bottom of the classroom door, Topchen could see the shadow of the gunman's feet each time he passed the room. The students heard more gunfire.

Crouched, he turned around and saw his teacher staring at his cell phone. The digital glow illuminated Samuel Lee's face.

Topchen thought he was texting, so he leaned in to tell his instructor to stop.

"Then I see over his shoulder," Topchen said. "He's just frozen."

Lee was staring at a photo of his wife and his 9-month-old baby.

Soon, the shooter returned. He wiggled the classroom's door handle, then kicked at the door.

Topchen and his classmates held their breath.

Three or four shots blasted through the door, shattering the window.

No one made a sound.

The bullets had whizzed over Topchen's head. He reached down and felt something wet running down his shin. Glass shards from the window pane had cut his leg.

The volley of gunfire emboldened Antonio, who had spent the last few minutes repeating a prayer in his head: "Hail Mary, full of grace ..."

He crawled to a spot next to the door and the woman who'd locked it.

"I decided," he said, "if he came back, I would fight him instead of die."

As they drove into the Oikos parking area a little after 11 a.m., Katleen Ping's parents and brother found yellow police tape cordoning off the building. Their daughter had not yet called them, but that was not abnormal. She did not own a cell phone.

The police had set up a perimeter, and they appeared just as confused as the onlookers and reporters who'd begun to gather.

The first 911 calls had come in at 10:33 a.m., just moments after the first shots were fired. Police arrived three minutes later, but didn't know if the shooter was still inside. They proceeded as if he was.

Outside the building, the first officers on the scene found a bleeding woman facedown on the concrete. A blood trail, presumably from another injured person, led down the street.

A man lay motionless in the parking lot. "It looks like he's got a gunshot to the head," radioed an officer. "Nonresponsive."

The Pings could not see much from their position as police continued to move reporters and family members farther from the building.

Instinct told Mary Ping her eldest daughter was somehow safe. She was the centerpiece of their family.

After Liberty Ping left his family in the Philippines to emigrate to the United States in 1995, Katleen Ping had helped her mother raise her siblings before they could emigrate, too.

Once a year, Mary Ping recalled, they traveled from their rural home in Laguna province to the capital city of Manila. Most girls wanted to head to the mall. Katleen Ping, though, wanted to buy books. After she arrived in the United States at age 18, she worked for two years alongside her mother as a nursing assistant at a home for the elderly. She saved enough money to help her parents put a down payment on their East Oakland home.

"Some people have teenagers who act like teenagers," Mary Ping said of her daughter. "We always had an adult."

The officers inside the yellow tape had learned they were searching for a stout Asian man in his 40s.

At 11:05 a.m., 29 minutes after police first arrived, an officer radioed, "We're getting information the shooter is in there reloading."

SWAT units and other officers huddled outside two glass doors along the Edgewater Drive entrance and prepared to shoot them out with bean bags. They were going inside.

They didn't know the shooter was already gone.

Topchen and his classmates recognized Katleen Ping's voice again coming from the hallway. This time it was faint. "Help, help."

The voice went quiet for what felt like minutes, then started again. "Help, help."

The students were paralyzed. They feared if they opened the door the shooter would appear. If they stayed inside, they could not help Ping, who'd clearly been hurt.

"But every time she said 'help' it felt good," Topchen said, "because we knew she was still alive."

At some point, though, her faint cries stopped altogether.

They heard the sirens approaching - "The best sound in the world," Topchen said - and then officers shouted their presence in the hallway. Still, the classmates refused to respond. Police yelled for them to unlock the door or show their hands through the shattered window, but Topchen and the others made them break in.

"If they were really the police," he said, "they could come get us."

The officers let the students out, patted them down for weapons as they brushed by, and led them down the hallway to the outside.

Some of the students looked down and saw strewn papers, shell casings and streaks of blood.

Others just kept running, their eyes forward.

At a Safeway store in Alameda 5 miles away, a security clerk called the police at 11:21 a.m. An Asian man, 5 feet 7 and 220 pounds, had walked into the store and told a clerk, "I just shot some people."

It was One Goh.

He had taken the car keys of one of his victims, Tshering Rinzing Bhutia, the man found dead in the school parking lot. Police found the gun in a tributary less than a mile from Oikos University and along Goh's escape route to Alameda.

When police arrived, shopper Lisa Resler was at the store with her 4-year-old daughter. She said the man on the ground getting arrested looked out of it, sedated. The Alameda officers handed him over to Oakland police, where investigators said he confessed to the killings.

They made difficult phone calls, including the one to their son-in-law in the Philippines.

At some moments, they would burst into tears of grief. At others, they laughed at silly memories, like the way Katleen Ping had a knack for dinging the car bumper as she backed the car out of their long driveway.

The family had spent hours outside the police tape that Monday before they got an officer's attention. They were led into an adjacent building. An officer asked Mary Ping who she was related to, and asked her to spell her daughter's name.

"Even when the police officer told me, 'She's one of the seven,' " Mary said, "I did not hear it. I still hoped. I hoped, in my heart, my daughter was still alive."

She remembers hearing herself scream and squeezing the arm of someone nearby. She remembers begging in Tagalog with a Filipina friend who worked at the school to let her into the building.

"I must have asked her five times," Mary said. "She said, 'No one is in there, sister.' "

The next evening, someone from the county coroner's office came by with photographs taken at the morgue.

Mary could not look. Liberty identified his oldest daughter.

It took a few more days until they figured out how to tell Kayzzer. The boy had Skyped with his father since his mother's death. He'd also spent time clustered around the computer in the living room with relatives who clicked through pictures of his mother.

He knew people were crying and people were sad, but no one seemed able to explain things to him in words he could understand.

In a rare quiet moment at the home, Kaine asked his young nephew to turn off the television and sit next to him on the couch in the family's living room.

"Where's Mom?" Kayzzer asked.

"She's in heaven," Kaine replied.

"Is heaven a happy place or sad place?"

"It's a happy place."

"Is Mom happy?"

"She's happy."

The Oikos shooting story

This story was reported based on interviews with witnesses, victims' relatives, court documents, police sources and police radio tapes. Key among the material are prosecutor's filings and police reports of One Goh's confession.

Goh has not entered a plea to the charges filed against him, including seven counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder. Prosecutors have not announced whether they intend to seek the death penalty.